422

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(5) February 2009doi:10.1598/JA AL.52.5.6 © 2009 International Reading Association (pp. 422– 431)

Through the juxtaposition of

traditional and new literacy

tasks and through explicit

attention to problematic

texts and literacy practices,

these preservice teachers

developed discursive

metaknowledge of the

centrality of literacy to

learning content.

Literacy—even narrowly construed as reading and writing—is central to learning science and mathematics, and teachers of science and mathematics can better teach their students if they understand literacy’s role in learning (Moje, 2007; Yore, Bisanz, & Hand, 2003). Recent scholarship has emphasized the need to build more powerful connections between literacy approaches and disciplinary content instruction (Conley, 2008; Moje, 2006, 2007; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) in order to improve the learning opportunities for ado-lescent learners (Ippolito, Steele, & Samson, 2008). But despite the consensus about literacy’s importance to teaching and learning in the content areas, secondary preservice teachers are often dismissive of efforts to incorporate practices that focus explicitly on literacy (Moje, 2006; O’Brien & Stewart, 1990; O’Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995). The question is, What would science and mathematics preservice teachers need to understand about literacy to bet-ter appreciate its role in teaching and learning content?

This article explores that question and takes an approach uncommon in the research on teacher education in content area literacy. As science and mathematics teacher educators, we start with a focus on content knowledge rather than on literacy strategies. We know that many preservice teachers be-lieve that the most effective way to learn content is by directly engaging with subject matter. In science, this might be through hands-on inquiry investiga-tions, and in mathematics, by solving real-world applied problems. Further, preservice teachers often perceive content area literacy strategies to be a bur-densome collection of technical terms and protocols rather than a vehicle for supporting learning (O’Brien et al., 1995). Consequently, texts are often seen as supplementary resources for—or even barriers to—the applied learning to which preservice teachers are most committed.

Perspectives that disconnect content learning from literacy practices are rapidly becoming untenable (Norris & Phillips, 2003). With the Internet commanding an increasing part of our daily lives, the classic science or math-ematics classroom consisting of a teacher, students, and a printed textbook is fast becoming obsolete (Walker & Bean, 2003). Information is no longer

Mark R. Olson | Mary P. Truxaw

Preservice Science and Mathematics Teachers and Discursive Metaknowledge of Text

423

Pres

ervi

ce S

cien

ce a

nd M

athe

mat

ics

Teac

hers

and

Dis

curs

ive

Met

akno

wle

dge

of T

ext

authority on the teacher and textbooks (Draper, 2002).

A second strand suggests that teachers’ pedagogi-cal goals resist content area literacy approaches. The problems with texts that many preservice teachers see as pressing are simply not addressed by literacy strat-egies (Donahue, 2000; Fisher & Ivey, 2005). Many teachers (and their students) view reading science and mathematics texts as boring—and reading strategies generally fail to make boring texts more interesting. Instead, preservice teachers want strategies to make the subject matter instruction more experiential and applicable to the real world and less text based. Compounding this perceived misalignment of goals is the fact that content teachers may feel poorly qualified to teach using content area literacy approaches (Hall, 2005; Lesley, Watson, & Elliot, 2007), further reduc-ing the likelihood of their use.

A third strand in the literature considers preser-vice teachers’ beliefs about teaching and how such be-liefs frame—and ultimately resist—their content area literacy experiences in teacher education programs. Holt-Reynolds (1992) showed how beliefs filter ex-periences and dramatically shape what is learned in teacher education courses. For example, based on their own experiences, preservice teachers may believe lis-tening to lectures is active engagement in learning and simply dismiss teacher educators’ arguments that such learning is passive (Holt-Reynolds, 1992).

Across these accounts, we find compelling reasons for why content area literacy approaches are not visible in preservice teachers’ emerging practices. But we also notice an important feature common to each strand: Content area literacy is largely positioned as a set of strategies external to science or mathematics content. Content area literacy is seen by preservice teachers as a literacy approach that is secondary, rather than central, to teaching and learning in the content areas.

For this study, we begin with the assumption that preservice teachers’ success in and commitment to their disciplines also makes it difficult for them to see how literacy practices are central to the learn-ing of content. We recognize that our preservice teachers have achieved considerable success in school science and mathematics while pursuing disciplin-ary subject majors. Like many secondary teachers,

easily vetted by teachers, librarians, or publishers, and new skills are required to capitalize on the informa-tion potential of the World Wide Web. Researchers have begun to examine student practices related to digital literacies (Brem, Russell, & Weems, 2001; Coiro, 2005; Damico & Baildon, 2007; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; McNabb, 2006; Wilder & Dressman, 2006), but little work has examined what teachers know about these new literacy practices or how such knowledge builds on established under-standings of the role of literacy in mathematics or sci-ence learning (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).

With the infusion of new information sources, we see expanded opportunities to help preservice teachers develop more sophisticated understandings of content area literacy. This article describes and analyzes one such opportunity—an assignment given within the context of a preservice secondary science and mathematics content-methods course. First, we brief ly examine how scholars have accounted for the resistance of preservice teachers to content area lit-eracy approaches. Second, we build upon Gee’s (1989) notions of metaknowledge and powerful literacy to explain how these constructs illuminate preservice teachers’ perspectives on content area literacy and content learning. Third, we show how an assign-ment problematized school science and mathematics literacy practices and provided the preservice teach-ers with opportunities to develop valuable discursive metaknowledge. Finally, we discuss implications of this work for teacher educators.

BackgroundPreservice Teachers’ Views of Content Area LiteracyThe extensive literature on preservice teachers and content area literacy offers a compelling account for preservice teachers’ resistance to literacy approaches that weaves together at least three major strands. One strand argues that the structures of traditional con-tent instruction resist content area literacy approaches (Alger, 2007; Moje, 2006; O’Brien et al., 1995). For instance, many content area literacy approaches aim to disperse instructional authority across students and teachers, while traditional content instruction centers

424

Jour

nal

of A

dole

scen

t &

Adu

lt L

iter

acy

52(5

)

Fe

brua

ry 2

009

Gee argued that the alignment between main-stream culture and dominant discourses helps explain why mainstream students generally have less diffi-culty participating in such discourses than do other students. Because the dominant discourse is similar to their experiences, there is less difference to over-come. We argue that a parallel exists here and that because content area teachers are highly proficient in their dominant discourse, they, like mainstream stu-dents, are challenged to notice it. This has the effect of rendering the discursive practices of subjects such as science and mathematics, like the proverbial water to the fish, invisible to the teacher.

Gee (1989) called the knowledge of discursive practices “powerful literacy” (p. 23). Powerful literacy goes beyond participation in—or control of—a dis-course to include the metaknowledge required to cri-tique that discursive practice. For example, one kind of discursive metaknowledge useful for teachers includes understanding how reasoning in everyday situations compares to reasoning in science and mathematics. If a teacher explicitly understands how the dominant dis-courses of school science and mathematics work—as discursive practices—then this knowledge can be used to help students who do not control these discourses to bridge the gap. Indeed, researchers have shown that traditional science instruction often excludes stu-dents’ personal experiences as resources for evaluat-ing scientific claims (Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery, & Hudicourt-Barnes, 2001). Teachers who have discursive metaknowledge of how claims work, both in students’ everyday reasoning and in school sci-ence, can help students understand how school science is both similar to and different from everyday life.

Gee’s notions of metaknowledge and powerful literacy provide a useful frame for considering our content area literacy work with science and math-ematics preservice teachers. As teacher educators, we aim to prepare teachers who understand and can bridge the differences in the dominant discourses of school mathematics and science and the secondary discourses of their students. Because university con-tent courses generally fail to develop metaknowledge of science and mathematics as discursive practices, teacher education has an important role to play. In this article, we illustrate how one assignment was useful

their primary identi-ties are as disciplin-ary experts (Beijaard, Verloop, & Vermunt, 2000; Helms, 1998). Because they have been successful at learning anatomy or organic chemistry or calculus, the literacy practices of the dis-ciplines have become largely invisible to them (D. Hartman, personal communica-

tion, March 28, 2007).To make the literacy practices of content learning

visible, we use a novel strategy that compares how students in schools engage with both traditional and Internet texts. The content of these texts appropri-ates features of legitimate science or mathematics sub-ject matter but is in fact nonsensical. We show how the insertion of problematic content into the literacy practices of school disrupts the invisibility of text and illustrates how literacy practices fundamentally shape understanding. We use Gee’s (1989) concepts of meta-knowledge and powerful literacy to explain what our preservice teachers learned from this assignment and how the exercise rendered previously invisible literacy practices visible.

Discursive Metaknowledge and Content Area LiteracyGee (1989) equated literacy with the ability to par-ticipate in social situations or discourses. Although much of Gee’s later work in discourses emphasized issues in addition to participation (e.g., identity), we find his earlier formulation of literacy to be useful for this study. Gee noted two different types of literacies or discourses: “primary discourses,” which develop in familial surroundings, and “secondary discourses,” which are used in all other contexts (p. 22). From Gee’s perspective, the purpose of schooling is to help students participate in and gain control over second-ary discourses that are valued by society. Discourses so valued are considered “dominant discourses” (Gee, 1989, p. 20).

Researchers

have shown that

traditional science

instruction often

excludes students’

personal experiences

as resources for

evaluating scientific

claims.

425

Pres

ervi

ce S

cien

ce a

nd M

athe

mat

ics

Teac

hers

and

Dis

curs

ive

Met

akno

wle

dge

of T

ext

of the investigator and the other playing the role of a secondary school student. After the pairs of preservice teachers finished, we debriefed as a group. In the next three weeks, the preservice teachers conducted their investigations and wrote their analysis papers.

Description of TasksThe traditional print task, reproduced in Figure 1, con-sisted of a paragraph of informational text and a line graph illustrating the relationship described in the text. The content of the task appropriated features common to science and mathematics texts but was, in terms of factual content, nonsensical. The major claim of the paragraph is that change in global temperature is re-lated to the decreasing number of pirates in the world. This text was selected to see how students coordinated the information in the paragraph and the line graph. In addition, the text made problematic use of correla-tion to argue a causal claim, and the graph contained a number of inaccuracies. In the Internet task, we were curious to see what challenges students encountered as they searched for information (e.g., how and where search strategies broke down). The first part of the in-vestigation had the preservice teachers ask the students to think aloud while reading the print text about pirates and global warming; the second part had the students think aloud while using the Internet to answer the question, How might pirates affect global warming?

Data and AnalysisWe drew upon the 24 preservice teachers’ analysis pa-pers and our own ref lective notes and memos written as we conducted this work. We used inductive coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994) as we looked systemati-cally at the reports using qualitative data analysis soft-ware. We found that the papers contained patterns for how students and preservice teachers view content-specific literacy practices. These patterns formed the basis for our identification of the three types of dis-cursive metaknowledge we describe next.

The Development of Discursive MetaknowledgeTo explain how these problematic texts served as op-portunities to develop metaknowledge about school

in generating metaknowledge of important features of school science and mathematics discourse that are particularly important for understanding the central role of literacy in teaching and learning content.

ApproachParticipantsThirteen science and 11 mathematics preservice teachers in the senior year of a five-year teacher ed-ucation program completed a semester-long science and mathematics teaching methods course taught by the authors. These secondary preservice teachers were concurrently taking a practicum in local middle and high schools. This content methods course precedes a semester-long student teaching experience. All pre-service teachers participated in this assignment and granted their permission for us to examine their re-ports for this study; all names used in reporting results are pseudonyms.

AssignmentThe assignment was to investigate how secondary school students made sense of traditional literacy prac-tices compared with online literacy practices. We use traditional literacies to denote practices associated with reading and comprehension of print text and new lit-eracies to denote those practices associated with online reading and comprehension (Leu et al., 2004). The as-signment was to conduct think-aloud protocols with practicum students as they engaged with a traditional literacy task that consisted of a paragraph of informa-tional text and an associated line graph and with a new literacies task that asked the student to use the Internet to find additional information related to the text and graph. During these two tasks, the preservice teachers took field notes and recorded what students said and did. The preservice teachers then wrote a three- to five-page analysis paper of their work with students.

To scaffold our preservice teachers’ abilities to productively investigate the student literacy practic-es, we modeled using the tasks during the methods classes. First, we showed them how to conduct the think-aloud using a paragraph different from the text used in the assignment. Then the preservice teachers worked in pairs to do the tasks, one taking the role

426

Jour

nal

of A

dole

scen

t &

Adu

lt L

iter

acy

52(5

)

Fe

brua

ry 2

009

1. How textual authority shapes reading

2. How literacy practices are dialogic

3. How literacy practices are contextual

Although such metaknowledge has long been a part of the discourse community of literacy educators (Moje, Dillon, & O’Brien, 2000; Wells, 2007), these ideas

science and mathematics discursive practices, we look

at two sites within the process: the practice session

where the preservice teachers used the tasks for the

first time and the preservice teachers’ written reports.

In particular, we found that these tasks helped pre-

service teachers develop the following three types of

metaknowledge:

Figure 1 Traditional Print Task

Part one of the task was to conduct a think-aloud with a student reading this text, and the second part was to ask the student to think-aloud while using the Internet to answer the question, How might pirates affect global warming?

Note. Reprinted with permission from www.venganza.org

Global Average Temperature vs. Number of Pirates

Glob

al A

vera

ge T

empe

ratu

re (C

)

Number of Pirates (Approximate)

35000 45000 20000 15000 5000 400 17

18201860

1880

1920

1940

1980

2000

16.5

16

15.5

15

14.5

14

13.5

13

www.venganza.org

Rising Global Temperature

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s. The graph below shows the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

427

Pres

ervi

ce S

cien

ce a

nd M

athe

mat

ics

Teac

hers

and

Dis

curs

ive

Met

akno

wle

dge

of T

ext

when one is reading in school science and mathemat-ics, the authority of the text positions reading as the process of extracting meaning from that text.

Because her peers recognized Karen as an excellent student, this was a poignant demonstration that differ-ent interpretations of text do not simply align with some facile notion of “reading skill.” Karen’s interpre-tation showed that a reader’s perception of the authority of the text shapes how one interprets that text. We also recognized that what Karen did was, in fact, what is generally expected of students in school reading. How such a presumption can radically shape the interpreta-tion made a deep impression on all of us.

Textual Authority Metaknowledge Developed in Reports. The preservice teachers’ reports also docu-mented how presumptions of textual authority shaped students’ engagement with the tasks. The students tended to read the traditional print task very carefully, often considering each word or rereading sentences. One preservice teacher wrote, “With the paper read-ing, the student ran his finger over all of the words in order not to miss a word and to understand the print.” In contrast, the preservice teachers reported that the students seldom read carefully on the Internet, instead quickly scanning search results and webpages to iden-tify if relevant information was presented. Another preservice teacher, Jenn, explained this pattern, stat-ing, “If the students felt uncomfortable with informa-tion on a certain site, they just left it and looked for another site that made them feel comfortable.”

Most students made quick judgments about the authority of a website. For instance, one student ex-plained why she left one page as soon as she deter-mined it was a blog: “Blog pages are not credible! Blogs are websites where people post their opinions.” Other students simply selected the link returned first by the search engine and then quickly scanned the website for keywords, often reading only a small por-tion of the page. Still other students found websites related to scientific organizations that were deemed trustworthy. The key point here is that the preser-vice teachers saw clear differences in the students’ ap-proaches to text; how students approached the text was related to the perceived authority of that text. This metaknowledge of discursive practice was fur-ther developed by the observed contrasts of the print

were new to our preservice teachers. In the juxtaposi-tion of traditional and new literacy tasks and through explicit attention to the problematic texts and literacy practices, preservice teachers developed discursive metaknowledge of the centrality of literacy to learn-ing content.

How Authority of Text Shapes Reading

Textual Authority Metaknowledge Developed in Practice Session. The first type of metaknowledge—how the authority of text shapes reading—was devel-oped in the context of the preservice teachers’ practice session with the tasks. One teacher, Karen, who took the role of a student in the practice session, read the traditional information text in what was initially a surprising way. Instead of reading the word pirates to mean sea-faring outlaws, Karen pronounced the word “pur-ah-tees” and interpreted the text to be about an obscure animal or plant species. That is, she read the text to be about the decline of an authentic species as the result of global warming. When she described what she’d done in the subsequent class discussion, a number of her classmates initially laughed, but it was clear that Karen wasn’t trying to be funny. When asked to explain what she was thinking about as she read the text, she explained that she had initially con-sidered, and rejected, the sea-faring outlaw interpre-tation because then “the paragraph wouldn’t make sense.” She also explained that, as a student in science, there were many times when she had to read things that didn’t initially make sense, but she had to learn them. Karen’s explanation was intriguing and, as a class, we looked again at the features of this text that made it appear authentic.

Indeed, we identified a set of features that made quite a compelling case. For instance, the pirates text used features of scientific discourse such as technical language (e.g., statistically significant, inverse relation-ship), it considered a scientific “problem” (e.g., global warming, earthquakes, other natural disasters), and it cued presumed authority structures (e.g., the prompt was offered as a text provided by a teacher in a class). From this vantage point, the class came to recognize that it was quite plausible and reasonable for a reader to see the pirates text as an authentic school science text. As Karen alluded to in her own explanation,

428

Jour

nal

of A

dole

scen

t &

Adu

lt L

iter

acy

52(5

)

Fe

brua

ry 2

009

The realization of the importance of the interac-tion between reader and text was surprising to our preservice teachers. And because preservice teach-ers may fail to recognize the ways in which text in science and mathematics is dialogic, this experience provided them with a vivid example that reading is more than extracting meaning from text and that the reader’s perspective shapes what is understood.

Dialogic Metaknowledge Developed in Reports. The preservice teachers found that, like Karen, how their students engaged with the tasks was related to how they made sense of the content. One student immedi-ately suspected that the premise of the traditional task was false. Therefore, he “looked for ways to interpret the passage and graph as incorrect.” For students who did not examine the premise, the approach could be quite different. For instance, Erin explained, “[one student] read exactly what was on the page and re-stated what she read or thought she read. The student did not try to interpret the graph.” This student “did not once argue with [the claim] or question the data presented to her.” The use of problematic content for the traditional task showed the preservice teachers that reading is a dialogic process that depends not only on the student’s ability to decode text but also on how the student approaches the text.

Differences in approaches to text were even more striking in the Internet task. Each preservice teacher’s report attempted to characterize either the success or failure of the student to conduct a fruitful search and to productively interpret information on websites. How this was done varied: Some students simply clicked the first website returned by the search engine, but others made selections from the search page. Some students selected the “cached” version of the search result because the search terms were highlighted on the linked page. Other students used the key combi-nation “control + f” to immediately begin searching the linked page for their search terms.

Across the two tasks, the preservice teachers saw that how students engaged with the task shaped what meaning they made. Instead of a straightforward pro-cess of decoding text, a dynamic and idiosyncratic process was observed by the preservice teachers. As Jordan summarized in her report, “[It] was par-ticularly interesting to see exactly how students gain

text reading and the online reading approaches em-ployed by students.

If we consider traditional print text reading as part of one discursive practice and reading online as part of another (Coiro, 2005; Leu et al., 2004), then we would expect to see differences in student partici-pation. Here, the traditional task was embedded with-in the discourse of school science and mathematics. Consequently, the students generally aimed to read the print text carefully and to consider each word. In the discourse of online reading, students showed that textual authority was based on types of websites (e.g., blogs, commercial sites, educational institutions) as well as on how successfully the site matched the search terms. One preservice teacher, David, felt that the Internet opened up opportunities for students to become more critical thinkers because the presump-tion of authority in traditional texts was removed. He found that “when searching for information, [his] student was truly engaged in critically analyzing in-formation and reading with a bit of skepticism. This was in great contrast to how she read the paper-based material earlier.”

This comparison of the approaches to text in traditional print and Internet formats provided op-portunities for the preservice teachers to develop metaknowledge of how authority shapes practices. The second type of metaknowledge the preservice teachers developed in their investigations concerns the dialogic nature of literacy practices.

How Literacy Practices Are Dialogic

Dialogic Metaknowledge Developed in Practice Session. The second type of metaknowledge—that literacy practices are dialogic rather than one-way transmissions of information—developed in the practice session in the following way. Karen’s “pur-ah-tees” interpretation had been a dramatic demon-stration of how reading involves interaction between the reader and the text. The way Karen had under-stood the text was not due to an inability to decode text. Because informational text in school science and mathematics is considered to be objective and to have unambiguous meaning, this example showed how a reader’s perspective and choices shaped her reading of text.

429

Pres

ervi

ce S

cien

ce a

nd M

athe

mat

ics

Teac

hers

and

Dis

curs

ive

Met

akno

wle

dge

of T

ext

ImplicationsThe approach we have taken in this study adds to our un-derstanding of the re-sistance of preservice teachers to content area literacy. It also demonstrates how a convergence of per-spectives from teacher educators in both lit-eracy and the content areas can be generative of new insights and questions (Draper, 2008; Forman & Ansell, 2001; Lemke, 1990; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Tuckey & Anderson, 2008). Such questions include, How does coming to understand the literacy practices of a content area re-shape preservice teachers’ own understandings of con-tent knowledge and how to teach it? The work begun here also suggests that teachers need to understand not only the literacy practices of their content area but also the literacy practices of their students. What does such understanding look like, and how might it develop? What approaches might foster this kind of learning within preservice teacher education?

A basic challenge facing content area literacy instruction has been to convince preservice teachers that literacy belongs in the content classroom. Our approach of focusing on problematic content tasks helped preservice teachers see that literacy practices are actually already there. Rather than focusing on content and literacy, we made progress toward an emergent understanding of the literacy practices of content. We suggest that the discursive metaknowl-edge of literacy practices of content contributes to a productive notion of powerful content literacy for teachers. Although most teachers would agree that knowing students well is important for motivating learning, our work shows that teachers should also know how students’ discursive practices shape oppor-tunities to learn science and mathematics.

Further, teachers’ abilities to recognize and ad-dress students’ struggles with school-based discursive practices may depend, in part, on their abilities to un-derstand how meaning is shaped by authority, how

information, decide whether the information is cred-ible and whether the information is relevant to the task with which they are presented.” It was clear to the preservice teachers that students engaged with the texts in multiple ways. The dialogic nature of lit-eracy practices is metaknowledge similar to the third type we discuss—the contextual nature of literacy practices.

How Literacy Practices Are ContextualNot only did the preservice teachers see how students engaged with the tasks dialogically, but also they saw that, for some students, facility with one task did not mean facility with the other. That is, some were adept at reading the traditional text and yet demonstrated difficulty in reading on the Internet and vice versa. The preservice teachers were struck by this obser-vation due to their presumption that reading online would be similar to reading print text—that is, read-ing is reading is reading.

Preservice teachers documented the ways in which students either did or did not demonstrate fa-cility with Internet text. Overall, they found that stu-dents needed to develop a more robust set of Internet reading comprehension strategies. This was surprising because, as Susan noted, “I think that a lot of times, teachers assume that since students have grown up with this technology that they’ll automatically know how to use it.” Further, it was not the case that stu-dents read the traditional task the same way as the Internet task, showing that reading printed text is different from reading online (Coiro, 2005; Coiro & Dobler, 2007). Doug explained this difference:

For the traditional portion of the activity, I felt that because there were no other materials to reference and compare the information to, she may have felt satisfied in believing it and not questioning its validity. As for the new literacies portion of the activity, I felt that the student spent much more of her time critically evalu-ating what she read.

Doug’s explanation suggests that the reading practices of an individual student differ based on the context. The examination of these literacy practices showed that “critical evaluation” was not a stable trait and that students’ literacy practices varied by context.

A basic challenge

facing content area

literacy instruction

has been to convince

preservice teachers

that literacy belongs

in the content

classroom.

430

Jour

nal

of A

dole

scen

t &

Adu

lt L

iter

acy

52(5

)

Fe

brua

ry 2

009

of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(3), 254–263. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.51.3.5

Donahue, D.M. (2000). Experimenting with texts: New science teachers’ experience and practice as readers and teachers of reading. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43(8), 728–739.

Draper, R.J. (2002). Every teacher a literacy teacher? An analy-sis of the literacy-related messages in secondary methods textbooks. Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 357–384. doi: 10.1207/s15548430jlr3403_5

Draper, R.J. (2008). Redef ining content-area literacy teacher education: Finding my voice through collaboration. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 60–83.

Fisher, D., & Ivey, G. (2005). Literacy and language as learn-ing in content-area classes: A departure from “every teacher a teacher of reading.” Action in Teacher Education, 27(2), 3–11.

Forman, E., & Ansell, E. (2001). The multiple voices of a mathe-matics classroom community. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 46(1–3), 115–142. doi: 10.1023/A:1014097600732

Gee, J. (1989). What is literacy? Journal of Education, 171(1), 18–25.

Hall, L.A. (2005). Teachers and content area reading: Attitudes, beliefs and change. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(4), 403–414. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2005.01.009

Helms, J.V. (1998). Science—and me: Subject matter and iden-tity in secondary science teachers. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(7), 811–834. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1098 -2736(199809)35:7<811:AID-TEA9>3.0.CO;2-O

Holt-Reynolds, D. (1992). Personal history-based beliefs as rel-evant prior knowledge in course work. American Educational Research Journal, 29(2), 325–349.

Ippolito, J., Steele, J., & Samson, J. (2008). Introduction: Why adolescent literacy matters now. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 1–6.

Lemke, J.L. (1990). Talking science: Language, learning, and values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Lesley, M., Watson, P., & Elliot, S. (2007). “School” reading and multiple texts: Examining the metacognitive development of secondary-level preservice teachers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(2), 150–162. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.51.2.6

Leu, D.J., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J.L., & Cammack, D.W. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the internet and other information and communication technologies. In R. Ruddell & N. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 1570–1613). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

McNabb, M.L. (with B.B. Thurber, B. Dibuz, P.A. McDermott, & C.A. Lee). (2006). Literacy learning in networked classrooms: Using the Internet with middle-level students. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Miles, M.B., & Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Moje, E.B. (2006, March). Integrating literacy into the secondary school content areas: An enduring problem in enduring institutions. Adolescent Literacy Symposium, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Moje, E.B. (2007). Developing socially just subject-matter in-struction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy teaching. Review of Research in Education, 31(1), 1–44. doi: 10.3102/0091732X07300046

literacy practices are dialogic, and how literacy prac-tices are contextual. These are promising avenues for inf luencing knowledge and dispositions of mathemat-ics and science preservice teachers. In turn, this may help them to meet the needs of diverse learners in this changing literacy landscape.

In summary, we contend that the literacy prac-tices surrounding content understanding in science and mathematics are so familiar to preservice teachers as to be largely implicit. This investigation challenged preservice teachers’ basic presumptions about the role of literacy in the learning and teaching of science and mathematics content. In doing so, previously invis-ible discursive practices were made visible. We be-lieve that teachers who see how literacy is central to understanding content can also see how content area literacy approaches help students learn content better. Teachers will need this kind of powerful literacy to help their students learn in the 21st century.

NotesWe acknowledge the Carnegie Corporation’s Adolescent Literacy Preservice Initiative for funding this project, the University of Connecticut’s New Literacies Team, Doug Hartman who coined the term “invisibility of text,” and Andy Anderson for many helpful com-ments. The complete assignment materials are available by contacting the authors.

ReferencesAlger, C.L. (2007). Engaging student teachers’ hearts and minds

in the struggle to address (il)literacy in content area class-rooms. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(8), 620–630. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.50.8.1

Beijaard, D., Verloop, N., & Vermunt, J.D. (2000). Teachers’ per-ceptions of professional identity: An exploratory study from a personal knowledge perspective. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(7), 749–764. doi:10.1016/S0742-051X(00)00023-8

Brem, S.K., Russell, J., & Weems, L. (2001). Science on the web: Student evaluations of scientific arguments. Discourse Processes, 32(2–3), 191–213. doi: 10.1207/S15326950DP3202&3_06

Coiro, J. (2005). Making sense of online text. Educational Leadership, 63(2), 30–35.

Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers as they search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(2), 214–257. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.42.2.2

Conley, M. (2008). Cognitive strategy instruction for adolescents: What we know about the promise, what we don’t know about the potential. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 84–106.

Damico, J., & Baildon, M. (2007). Examining ways readers engage with websites during think-aloud sessions. Journal

431

Pres

ervi

ce S

cien

ce a

nd M

athe

mat

ics

Teac

hers

and

Dis

curs

ive

Met

akno

wle

dge

of T

ext

Warren, B., Ballenger, C., Ogonowski, M., Rosebery, A.S., & Hudicourt-Barnes, J. (2001). Rethinking diversity in learn-ing science: The logic of everyday sense-making. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(5), 529–552. doi: 10.1002/tea.1017

Wells, G. (2007). Semiotic mediation, dialogue and the construc-tion of knowledge. Human Development, 50(5), 244–274. doi: 10.1159/000106414

Wilder, P., & Dressman, M. (2006). New literacies, enduring challenges? The inf luence of capital on adolescent readers’ Internet practices. In D.E. Alvermann, K.A. Hinchman, D.W. Moore, S.F. Phelps, & D.R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (2nd ed., pp. 205–230). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Yore, L.D., Bisanz, G.L., & Hand, B.M. (2003). Examining the literacy component of science literacy: 25 years of lan-guage arts and science research. International Journal of Science Education, 25(6), 689–725. doi: 10.1080/09500690305018

Olson teaches at Oakland University, Rochester,

Michigan, USA; e-mail olson2@oakland.edu. Truxaw

teaches at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA;

e-mail mary.truxaw@uconn.edu.

Moje, E.B., Dillon, D.R., & O’Brien, D. (2000). Reexamining roles of learner, text, and context in secondary literacy. The Journal of Educational Research, 93(3), 165–180.

Norris, S.P., & Phillips, L.M. (2003). How literacy in its funda-mental sense is central to scientif ic literacy. Science Education, 87(2), 224–240. doi: 10.1002/sce.10066

O’Brien, D., & Stewart, R. (1990). Preservice teachers’ perspec-tives on why every teacher is not a teacher of reading: A quali-tative analysis. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22(2), 101–129.

O’Brien, D., Stewart, R., & Moje, E.B. (1995). Why content litera-cy is difficult to infuse into the secondary school: Complexities of curriculum, pedagogy, and school culture. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(3), 442–463. doi: 10.2307/747625

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59.

Tuckey, S.F., & Anderson, C.W. (2008). Literacy in science: Using agency in the material world to expand the conversation. In M.W. Conley, J.R. Freidhoff, M.B. Sherry, & S.F. Tuckey (Eds.), Meeting the challenge of adolescent literacy: Research we have, research we need (pp. 113–144). New York: Guilford.

Walker, N.T., & Bean, T.W. (2003, April). Multiple uses of text in content area teachers’ classrooms. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.